1. Today, for Black History Month, I watched Amistad, a 1997 Steven Spielberg film. For background, see here. It’s about West Africans in the nineteenth century, who killed their captors on a slave ship and stood trial for their deed.
I watched it today because I don’t do any homework on Saturdays, so I could read the sub-titles without having to look up from my homework every minute.
And I wasn’t just reading the English translations of the African Mende language. I also put the movie on closed-caption so I could follow the legal arguments.
When I first watched the movie over a decade ago, I didn’t really understand what was going on. Who were the slaves on the slave-ship Amistad, the people who took over the ship after killing the Spaniards who ran it? Were they from Cuba, or were they from West Africa? It turns out that I was right to be confused, for that was a big point of debate. If they were from Cuba, as argued the prosecutors, then they were slaves; if they were from Africa, as the defense maintained, then they technically were not slaves, since Britain had banned the slave trade. As free people, they could legally rise against people attempting to kidnap them.
John Quincy Adams was an interesting character, and Anthony Hopkins definitely deserved his Academy Award for the role. Here was a washed-up ex-President, who wondered if he had really accomplished anything when he was in power. He dabbled in abolitionism and closely followed the Amistad case, even encouraging the defense to learn the story of the West Africans. Yet, he took a while before he committed himself to represent them. He drew from the wisdom and experience of one of the Africans, Cinque. Yet, he said that he didn’t care if there was a Civil War over the slavery question, which shows that he sometimes saw issues in terms of the big picture, rather than how they affect the individuals involved (i.e., the families who’d lose loved ones in war). So he tended to zoom in and out in his interaction with issues, sometimes focusing on the stories of individuals, and sometimes concentrating on the big picture, which includes national ideas, the type of country we are, etc.
I also liked the British captain because he successfully answered the smart-aleck prosecutor (a bully), who, along with Secretary of State John Forsyth, was trying to argue that there really wasn’t a secret fortress for the illegal slave trade. When the captain destroyed it at the end of the movie, he sent a message to Forsyth: You are right—the slave fortress does not exist!
Moreover, political theory went through my mind. What is the natural state of human beings: slavery or freedom? Southern politician John C. Calhoun (also the Vice-President under John Quincy Adams) wrote that slavery has existed for millennia. He even appealed to Eden to support his position, perhaps implying that Adam and Eve were God’s slaves. And, although Calhoun didn’t mention this, even Cingue’s African tribe had slavery (or, as it called them, workers), for people became slaves through war or debt. Yet, as John Quincy Adams contended, so many people struggle to be free. There’s something unfair about people having to work without enjoying the fruit of their labor.
The irony at the end of the movie was sad: Cinque got to go back home to Africa, but he found his tribe engaged in its own civil war, and he never saw his family again. Human nature exists everywhere, for good and for bad. We desire to be free, and we are right to do so, but there’s also a need to serve, to think of others besides ourselves. Otherwise, people get hurt, and we find ourselves enslaved to our own base desires.
2. For my weekly quiet time, I studied I Kings 13. A man of God (called Iddo by the rabbis—see II Chronicles 9:29) challenges King Jeroboam of Northern Israel. Jeroboam has set up a sanctuary with a golden calf and non-Levites as priests—all “no-no”s in the eyes of God. Iddo says that King Josiah will one day defile the sanctuary, and he gives Jeroboam a sign that he’s speaking God’s message: the altar collapses, and dust spills on the ground (when, as John MacArthur notes, the ashes are supposed to be dumped in a clean place—see Leviticus 4:12; 6:10-11). When Jeroboam orders that Iddo be seized, his hand withers. Jeroboam then asks Iddo to request from the LORD his (Iddo’s) God that Jeroboam’s hand be restored, and Iddo does so. Jeroboam invites Iddo to a meal, but Iddo declines, for YHWH has commanded him not to eat or drink on his mission, and to leave by a different route from which he came. Iddo is to convey God’s disgust with Jeroboam’s reign and sanctuary.
A prophet then invites Iddo to a meal. This prophet is said to be from Samaria in II Kings 23:18, yet he lives in Bethel, which is in the tribe of Benjamin. Perhaps he moved to Bethel to be near a seat of power, to get favor with Jeroboam. The prophet tells Iddo that an angel revealed to him that Iddo can now eat on his mission. God must have changed his mind! So Iddo goes to the prophet’s place for dinner, and God tells the prophet that God’s not pleased! Iddo leaves and is killed by a lion, but the lion touches neither Iddo’s corpse nor his donkey, nor (for that matter) the people passing by. The lion has done his mission for God, and that’s it! The prophet buries Iddo and asks that his own bones be buried alongside him. After Jeroboam hears of all this, he continues his sinful practices. He has heard that God will stand by his word, even to the harm of the person who carried it; yet, Jeroboam does not repent.
Iddo should have stuck with his mission, even though the prophet told him that an angel was allowing Iddo to eat. There was a purpose behind God’s commands to Iddo: to convey God’s displeasure at Jeroboam, his sanctuary, and Northern Israel. Why would God be so flippant as to change his mind on that? There are times when God changes his mind, but that’s often in response to people’s repentance. When God changes his mind, it’s not flippant, but it’s in accord with a standard of righteousness. And, if Iddo was wondering if God had changed his mind, he should’ve asked God, or waited for God to tell him if God had a change of plans.
What particularly interested me in this weekly quiet time was Josephus’ rendition of the story, which is found in Antiquities 8:9. According to Josephus, after Iddo (or, as Josephus calls him, Jadon) had died, the false prophet was trying to convince Jeroboam that God hadn’t caused his hand to wither and the altar to collapse. Those things had natural causes, he said! Jeroboam’s hand withered because it was tired from supporting all those sacrifices; once it got some rest, it was restored. And the altar collapsed because it was new and burdened with a bunch of sacrifices, so it couldn’t support all that weight! It interested me to see naturalistic explanations for seemingly supernatural phenomena in an ancient source, but I shouldn’t be too surprised, for I learned in a class that de-mythologization was a practice in the ancient world.